7 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Is it a car or a pc?
Date of Review: Jul 9, 2005
The Bottom Line: First AMD is leading in processors, and this laptop at the top of the pile with its features. If you edit video or play games enjoy!!
Own Laptops: Ferrari 3400 Dual Boot XP Pro/Linux Suse 9.3
HP Notebook XP Pro
I am upgrading to the Ferrari 4000 due to the AMD 64 Turion chip along with the new ATI X700.
The 4000 arrived packaged with the laptop, battery, bluetooth mouse (nice touch), recovery CD's, Screen Soft cloth. Easy to unpack and put together.
The configuration comes from Acer with 1gig of DR333 memory, which should be adequate. An improvement over the 3400 is that the owner can upgrade 2GB of memory without having to access under the keyboard, which would void the warranty. The hard drive is a 100GB 5400 RPM Hitachi Travelstar drive. Excellent choice on the hard drive for ACER. Except why not a 7200 RPM drive. For the price point this should be the case. Since the 3400 also came with a 4200 RPM, I assumed since no websites had the hard drive RPM that it was a 5400. I purchased a Hitachi Travelstar 7200 to replace the slower drive.
Style: Very nice, wide screen. The carbon fiber case is awesome. One difference from the 3400 there is no slip cover provided which I loved as I travel and it protected the case. The 4000 does come with a keyboard/screen cover protector, which I have never seen with other laptops. I hate the keyboard imprint on my screen.
Layout: The keyboard is the 5 degree curved and types very, very nice. There are 4 USB ports, 3 on one side and one along with fire wire. This layout is better again than the 3400 as I attach alot devices. DVI connection and TV out, very nice. Another great feature is the parallel port for old printers.
Operating System: Windows XP Pro default with the system. WARNING, LINUX SUSE 9.3 does not work with the system hardware easily. I imagine this is true for most Linux Distributions. The issue is around the video card and keyboard configuration. On another note, I wonder why the Windows 64 bit XP is not the default with the system?
Recovery CD's: Since I changed the hard drive and failed at loading Linux I tried the recovery CD's. These work well, but have a 98SE recovery disk to format the hard drive. The recovery CD's are not happy with the linux format. Once you are by this unusual issue that I created the recovery disks work great.
System performance: What would you expect from this configuration, but SPEED, which is only limited by Windows XP Pro 32 bit. I will probably go to 2gig of memory at some point and upgrade to the 64 bit windows until Linux has the drivers I need.
Screen: Nice and bright. The only thing I would have liked to have seen is the new LCD with glass surface. Really minor, but I am seeing this on most high end laptops.
Touchpad/Scroll: Acer has one of the nicest scroll and tap pads I have ever used. Acer kept the design from the 3400.
DVD/CD Burner: Nice dual layer burner, especially in a laptop.
Wireless/Bluetooth: Both built in and a nice feature is you can turn them off manually from buttons on the front of the laptop.
Sound: I am not an audiophile so it seems fine to me. It is a laptop.
Heat: Most laptop/Desktop replacements can heat you up which is fine for the winter. My 3400 could get toasty. The new AMD Turion and design is nice and cool considering what is running.
Software: Comes with Norton Anti Virus, probably limited time as I use another one I won't activate. NTI backup software, and NTI DVD burner. All I can say is that I will still be adding Nero. Very basic build, no bells and whistles.
Service: Acer builds Great laptops and this is my third one. I will tell you that I had a question on my 3400 and Acer support is notoriously lacking. Hopefully you never really need to have them respond to your email.
